We Are Risen: 10 Personal Easter Meanings

Every Sunday, I write a letter to our 20 year old son, Dalton. He’s serving for two years in England as a full time missionary for our faith. Normally, because he has limited time to access, read, and respond to letters, I compress my messages to bullet points. (Hard when I want to spread my heart across the page with an industrial sized ladle .)

Here is this week’s letter. You’ll forgive that I’d condense what’s most precious to me into a cheesy Top 10 List. And I know you’ll understand that this is only a fraction of a fraction of my reflections on what Easter means to me.

With Dalton traveling in Poland at Easter time

Dearest Dalton-

With a russet colored puppy at my hip, and soft rain drizzling on the bright suede daffodil heads in the garden, with a gray morning splintered by streaks of platinum and blue over the spindled forest, and with my scriptures and favorite sermons piled on the table in front of me, I’d say life is more than good. It’s reborn.

Christ rose so that we will rise too. But we rise in a manner more immediate and proximate than a distant, some-day promise of standing up in our graves. Yes, all humankind will walk with glorified bodies into Glory’s embrace. I don’t doubt that. But what does the resurrection mean for us in this moment? What does “He is Risen” say to my soul right now, right here, on my couch this Sunday morning ?

10 Meanings of He is Risen

1) “He is risen” means that He descended below and rose above every pain, betrayal, indignity, alienation, misunderstanding, sin, hurt, illness, separation, mistake, plaited crown and pounded nail. He did this for me. He did this for you. He did it for the perpetrators and the preoccupied Roman guards. He rose for all creation.

2) In every instance he rose high above humankind’s pettiness, vulgarity, brutality, obliviousness, indifference, and self-obsessed numbness. He calls on us to do the same. We are to rise and not return shrug for shrug, evil eye for evil eye. He urges us to fight darkness with light, coldness with warmth, crassness with refinement, indifference with engagement, ignorance with enlightenment, fakery in all its forms with pellucid truth.

3)He is still risen. His resurrection wasn’t some quaint myth, some poetic concoction, but a reality in bone and sinew. If the women’s sighting at the tomb and breaking bread with apostles doesn’t prove it, the Book of Mormon account with its many detailed pages and its multitude of eyewitnesses (and all the visions given modern prophets, i.e., D&C 76), are proofs worth considering. He lives now. I know this.

4) I know this because I have my own, intimate proof. “He is risen” has been enacted in our little family life, after having been struck dead in July, 2007. You can say, as I can, that by some power outside of ourselves we have been brought back to life, to life in abundance. We are risen! Honestly, I trusted his historic rising more than I believed possible our future rising from grief’s grave. But…here we are, my love. Who can deny that? Who can question something or someone hasn’t poured iron down our spines and molten force into our limbs once lined with death’s lead? Resurrection, wrote Reverend Laura Mendenhall, is for both sides of the tomb. We are proof of that.

5) “He is risen” means that he has conquered death. Not just death of the body. He conquered all death, including the death of hope, of dreams, of innocence, of union, of belief, of love. “He is risen” means that he can draw all of us upward from every iteration of death that we might have to experience. As I wrote in On Loss and Living Onward: “And so once again—raising us from either grave sin, grave sorrow, or from the grave itself—Christ has conquered death.“

6) That he rose for us means we are called to help others rise. This requires an alertness and compassion few of us have naturally. As our egos swell, they eclipse the face of The Other. And what’s worse, with that swelling sense of self, we might sometimes feel others deserve to stay low, lying flat, suffering nose-in-the-dust for their sins or circumstances. I’m ashamed to say I’ve felt that indignation tighten my jaw more than once. (“She made her bed, she’s got to lie in it. And I’m not fluffing her pillows.”) But Christ asks us to do as he did: rise to help others rise. All others. No exceptions, no lepers.

7)“He is risen” points to a supernal communing act. It means the most concrete, physiological communing (the reunion of body and spirit, cells and fibers, tibia and fibula.) It also means reuniting anything lost and buried with the found and living. We’re given through him, I believe, the capacity to live with our heads and hearts united. Beyond that, HIs example tells us to unite with our marginalized, forgotten, lonely brothers and sisters. We’re charged to stretch our arms as far and wide as we can and pull those out on the rim close to our center, to our heart. We are one. Division is demonic.

8)He rose through priesthood power. I’d not learned that truth until late in life, but the resurrection was a priesthood rite. This tells me something about the ultimate life-giving power God has allotted to mankind through priesthood. We are to use it not to elevate ourselves in any way, but to help others rise to greater life.

9) “He is risen” means that though we have no need to fear existentially, we have no excuse if we are complacent. Christ rose multiple times before he rose definitively, and by that I mean that he rose in response to those crushed by sickness, poverty, sin, evil, and death. He drew everything heavenward in his warm updraft. He knew everything would ultimately be renewed, but those timely losses –– of sight, hearing, health, sanity –– were worth his immediate attention anyway.

10)His resurrection was the vanishing point, the spot in time and timelessness where every agonizing question, loss, doubt, weakness and evil was absorbed and converted by some splendid alchemy into possibility and joy. All will be well, if not instantly, in time. And indeed. All is seen and known in his Eternal Now, all is taken into consideration as part of his creation, which is a continual re-creation.

And you have risen, too, Dalton, as you’ve followed Him. I can tell. I can feel it in your letters. When we follow him, we’re promised that, even if we’re required to traverse dark and alien terrain in the interim –– and we will be asked to trust through unspeakably dark places –– we will rise at last.

Oh my how you speak to my heart. How grateful I am for your example and teaching. How dearly I pray I may be able to transmit these lessons to my children as well as you do. Thank you, Melissa. And as the Greeks say, truly He is risen.